AWS Elemental launches MediaConnect

Written by CSI

30/11/18

MediaConnect is a live video transport solution that plugs the gaps in the AWS Media Services offer.

Buried among the many announcements to come out of re:Invent this week (which also included the AWS Ground Station satellite downlink service, a new cloud ground station-as-a-service) was news of the official launch of what AWS now calls MediaConnect.

MediaConnect is essentially a live video transport service that securely and efficiently transfers video into, around and out of the cloud. It is a new service for securely and reliably ingesting, transmitting and replicating live video feeds in the AWS cloud infrastructure, taking high quality video from an on-premise source or the cloud and distributing it globally. On its own, it does not do any encoding or transcoding.

According to Aslam Khader, Chief Product Officer of AWS Elemental, the company already started working on MediaConnect even as the original AWS Elemental Media Services - MediaConvert (file-to-file), MediaLive (live encoding), MediaPackage (just in time packaging), MediaStore (storage) and MediaTailor (server-side ad insertion) - launched in 2017. Since then, AWS Elemental has been working with a few lead customers, Discovery, Arqiva and ITV among them, which are now at various stages of deploying and using the service. Most customers at this stage are using it for contribution purposes.

“We continue to engage with customers to understand what are the gaps in some of the workflows that they were eager to deploy,” Khader said. “It became pretty clear very early on that, even as we were about to launch these services, having a means by which we could easily contribute live video into the cloud, move it around the cloud and egress it out efficiently and robustly and securely was something that stood out.”

MediaConnect made its private debut at IBC 2018 and is now commercially available to all existing and potential AWS customers under pay-as-you go models.

Video services and operators are increasingly moving workflows and operations to the cloud and MediaConnect enables three key workflows: contribution (bringing live video into the cloud); distribution; and entitlement.

The last of these is especially interesting for AWS and one it sees as having great potential, Khader noted.

“Potentially rights holders like HBO or Discovery that have rights to content, they can give the ability to entitle other AWS accounts to get access to that content. All you have to do is enter some simple parameters and that particular account gets entitled to this live stream,” khader said. “And then whenever that account you are distributing goes in the MediaConnect dashboard and starts up a flow, they can select from all the entitlements that are available to them as to which one they want to use to ingest the content into their flow,” he explained.

This allows customers to very efficiently share content with their business partners. This is especially relevant as more and more content and distribution is global in nature.

Initially at launch, AWS Elemental MediaConnect is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Khader said the other regions will follow “very quickly, in a matter of months”. Amazon has 14 regions in total globally.

“The key here is once we ingest the content into a region - the recommendation we give is stick to the region closest where the content originates – we try to get you to the closest ingestion point, the closest POP as possible. From there we transport the content over the AWS global network,” Khader said.

As an example, a Premier League game would be ingested in London where the content is produced, and transported over the AWS network and egressed in the Sydney region for further distribution.

In terms of optimisations to reduce jitter and buffering, MediaConnect offers customers a choice of video transmission protocols including Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), RTP with forward error correction (FEC), and the Zixi protocol, with support for some others to be introduced in 2019.

From a security perspective, live video streams can be secured with AES-256 encryption from an end-to-end perspective.

Born in the cloudIn the year since AWS Media services launched, over 2,000 media companies are using them in some shape or form in various workflows, according to the company. Some of these are “born in the cloud” as AWS calls them (ones that have never had any ground infrastructure). They have completely deployed their entire video pipelines using AWS media services.

AWS Media now has a mix of customers from large traditional names to the occasional use customers for live events, spinning channels up and down quickly. Among those using AWS Media services are fubo TV, which uses MediaTailor for ad insertion across all of their channels, iflix, Cablevision Mexico, Fox Sports and, of course, Amazon Prime Video.

Exactly how big media services are in the wider AWS scheme of things isn’t clear but Khader said they are playing an increasingly important role.

“Media & entertainment sector is an important one for AWS overall and as such media services is beginning to play a bigger role there,” he said. “Some companies run everything on AWS, from HR to support and provisioning systems. More and more we are seeing the adoption of media services with very large customers happening since AWS Media services launched,” he said.

Related Articles

Connected home evolution

Your
browser does not support HTML5 video.

In this video CSI talks to ARRIS about the emerging smart media device category and service integration of voice/smart assistants in the connected home

Helping MSOs migrate to DOCSIS 3.1

Your
browser does not support HTML5 video.

In this video, CSI talks to Rohde & Schwarz about cable's migration to DOCSIS 3.1 technology and other advanced cable tech network evolution, including testing